When I tell people that I am an author, they always ask me who my greatest influences are. I always respond with Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming. When I first submitted to Rainstorm Press the publisher asked me, “Espionage can get played out, what separates your book from all the others?” He asked a very valid question; there are countless stories about spies saving the world just in the nick of time. That led me to think about just why Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming’s novels became so popular, and I think I have gotten to the bottom of it. The characters. James Bond, and Jack Ryan were not only heroes but layered characters that always kept the readers guessing. Coming up with a good plot for espionage thrillers is not that difficult; the protagonist could be chasing down a super spy, uncovering a corrupt government, finding a nuclear bomb before it explodes … The possibilities are endless. Somehow the free world is going to be saved; however, no one is going to care about the free world if they don’t care about the person who saves it. In many different stories the plot is the main focus of the book. I believe that in espionage thrillers the characters must be the focus of the story. That is what is going to make a novel marketable. Fleming’s James Bond and Clancy’s characters like John Clarke and Jack Ryan have sold countless movies and video games, not because people care about the latest crazy ex-soviet general pointing nukes at the UK and the US. It’s because people are infatuated with these characters. The next Bond movie could be about 007 going to the super market, and you know what I’d pay to see it, and thousands of other fans would too. When I explained to the publisher the complex nature of X in my book, I convinced him that my main character had something that people wanted to read about. Slowly Memoir of a Variable is becoming a series with Ten Names arriving on Amazon in the upcoming months. My dream for X is that he will one day join the ranks of James Bond and Jack Ryan, two of the many heroes that have inspired me.